No Graves
by TheScreamingViking
Summary: Sephiroth became one with the Lifestream and sailed the cosmos. The Crucible didn't fire, Shepard couldn't defeat the Reapers, and the war raged on. The two collide.
1. Chapter 1

Sephiroth lingered before the window in the Normandy port observatory, studying the distant relay and the vast array of stars. It looked so still. Peaceful.

"You know what will happen when I kill the last of the Reapers," he said, his deep voice rumbling with multiple layers like Turian subharmonics.

"Assuming you last that long," Shepard said, not looking up from the report on the damage the Normandy had taken in the last fight. "They're learning and adjusting their strategy. Are you?

He turned his head to look at her sidelong. She wondered why he bothered. He didn't need to look in order to see.

"I will initiate a different strategy when the current one ceases to be effective."

"What's your backup plan?"

He put a hand on her wrist, interrupting the Omni-tool's projection.

"Have you made peace with it?" he asked, his voice low.

She met his gaze. Burning green eyes that cast his face in a harrowing light. How many dead planets looked back at her from behind the monster's face? Her jaw locked. She knew exactly how many Reapers he had claimed in the same way. Tens of thousands, in less than a month since she found him drifting in dark space. More than all their forces had managed to kill in the eight long years since the war started. Since the Crucible failed.

"I don't trade in peace," she hissed.

His eyes mocked her with their gentleness. Her armoured gauntlet creaked under the pressure of his grip on her arm. "I will gift it to you."

"It's not what you're selling either."

"Is it not?" He cocked his head. "Is that not why you called me? You would rather your worlds burn under my hand than that of your enemy." He loomed over her. His next words sighed through her mind. "You would rather become me then become what has already taken root within you."

She bared her teeth and a constellation of scar tissue across the right side of her face pulled tight.

"I am not the Reapers," she said in place of a denial. He could kill her enemy when nobody else could. The price… She swallowed harshly. She'd pay whatever price that came at.

He smiled and looked back to the relay. He couldn't travel through them. He needed her and the Normandy's IFF if he wanted to consume the Reapers before they finished what they came for and retreated back to dark space.

"No," he drawled, "you, human, are something else. It was not your message that drew my eye."

She closed her eyes. Then she straightened her spine. "Perhaps it was it my rank, general."

He didn't move, inhuman in his perfect stillness. "Your rank means nothing to me. I am not a soldier."

"I didn't call you one," she said.

"You cannot comprehend my existence."

She smiled, exposing her canines. "I can comprehend the empty patch on your belt where an insignia should be. The stars missing from your shoulders, and the instinctive march of a land based serviceman." His human body wasn't real, it was just an avatar he inhabited, but it had to have been real, once.

"These things mean nothing to me."

She crossed her arms. "You feel strongly about being indifferent."

He turned back to her. The bands of green energy of his real form hummed around her, upsetting the ship's sensors.

"Do you think I will spare you," he asked, quiet and curious, and his ice cold hand trailing up her cheek, "because I once wore a uniform?"

"You're _still_ wearing a uniform, and no," she ground out, straining to hold her ground. Everything in her screamed to run away, throw a punch, fall to her knees, _something_. She locked her muscles and forced herself to look up at him. "I have no delusions of receiving mercy." She knew what she'd done.

He tilted her head up and she hated him.

"Good," he said, with no trace of the feigned gentleness from before.

She wrenched her head out of his grasp.

"There." She point out toward the window, where the relay was beginning to glow and rotate. It opened and ships flooded through it, filling the star system. "I brought you more Reapers."

He turned his attention to the fleet and she felt like a taut rope suddenly cut as the pressure in her mind eased.

Sephiroth walked calmly through the sealed and reinforced windows into the void of space. His body gave way to a shapeless form of pure energy, magnificent as a star going supernova.

The Reapers converged on them.

* * *

Sephiroth killed them all.

Shepard watched the Reaper signals die out, one by one by one, from the screens in the command room.

His signal looked so harmless on the display, a little green dot passing through the red ones and turning them off on his way by. They were faster than him, much faster, and more manoeuvrable with astronomical numbers. He was simply unstoppable.

She didn't let herself watch from the windows anymore. Dreadnoughts sliced in two, kilometres-long capital ships collapsing into dust like poorly made sandcastles. It was… it was too much.

She focused on the blue dots instead, allied vessels fleeing the Reapers. She and the strategists in her crew co-ordinated their escape and the fighter ships that guarded them. Later she would use the Normandy to hold the relay open so they could escape the system. The Reapers controlled the relay network. Without the Normandy they either couldn't get through or they would be funnelled directly into ambushes. Without a ship, Sephiroth couldn't get through them at all.

A certain pressure on the back of her mind rose and fell, seemingly at random. Perhaps he had left some fragment of himself in the room to get a birds eye view of the battlefield. None of their strategies ever took him by surprise.

It lasted nearly an hour, as more vessels came through and zipped about the star system. Two Reapers chasing a small Alliance frigate arrived. Red dots and a blue dot, landing nearly on top of the green dot.

The two red blinked out. The blue dot did too.

Miranda looked up at her from across the table. A hush fell across the room, crew members looking to her from the harsh light of their consoles. They all saw.

"Maybe it was an accident," Miranda offered with a grimace. "They did all but crash into him."

Shepard kept her expression fixed, staring at the display. The innocent green dot glowing back up at her.

He was too precise for something so careless. And he enjoyed toying with them too much to do any such thing by accident.

The pressure on her mind never really lifted fully anymore. It leaned heavily on her now.

She dragged in a breath. He was watching.

The green dot didn't move from the mouth of the relay, waiting.

"That's a shame," she said quietly, pointedly. "I enjoyed working together."

She felt a presence at her back. She gripped the edge of the table, leaning heavily on it. She glanced behind her. Nothing.

"EDI," she called.

"Yes, Commander?" the AI that controlled the ship replied.

"The next time he moves on an allied vessel, I want you to delete our IFF."

The green dot didn't move.

The hush became a silence. Every head in the control room snapped to her.

The weight of a hand rested at the small of her back. She wasn't wearing her armour. Icy coldness seeped through her abdomen.

"Could you please verify that order for me, Shepard?" EDI asked, her tone steady.

She caught sight of silver drifting in the air out the corner of her eyes. She didn't look. It wouldn't be there if she looked. The presence at her back drifted until it felt like a freezing arm draped around her back and resting on her hip. A mocking gesture of support. Daring her to do it.

If she did nothing then he would freely harvest them alongside the Reapers.

Her mind shuttered around that thought.

'What difference does it make if you are mine today…' a deep voice whispered in her ear, 'or tomorrow?'

She locked her jaw. They couldn't die before the Reapers were defeated. They couldn't, or what was the point of it all? What was she holding on for if she couldn't outlast them?

Cold air sighed at her ear. 'How will you defeat them if you are trapped in this star system with me?'

"How will you get to the promised land if the Reapers take all the spirit energy and go home before you even get to the next star cluster?" she hissed under her breath. "Will you wait fifty thousand years until they come back for the next cycle?"

The cold seeping up her spine slid into her chest.

"Shepard?" Miranda asked, blinking at her with green eyes.

She lifted her chin.

"If Sephiroth moves on us or our allies," she said, loud and clear, "please delete our one-of-a-kind Reaper IFF."

"That's-" Miranda started.

"The only reason we can travel through the relays." She turned suddenly, leaning her back against the table and crossing her arms. "Yes, it is." She stared with narrowed eyes through the empty space where nobody stood and no silver hair drifted like rotting seaweed in a stagnant pond.

"Understood," EDI replied. "Orders lodged."

She held her breath and waited for the retaliation.

Her back felt naked and exposed with the false contact torn away. A shiver of cold ran up her spine to her scalp. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

The pressure on her mind seemed to stretch out, warping.

Goosebumps broke out on her skin.

And… nothing. Nothing happened.

She let out a strained breath.

The room returned to its usual state of quiet murmuring. She looked over her shoulder. Heads were turned to their consoles again, the battle ongoing and her crew doing their duty. They were accustomed to drastic orders and horrific risk. They trusted her.

Her head froze, captured in an iron grip. The room moved on at its normal pace, Javik barking instructions to a cruiser that had just entered the system, Miranda receiving information from the fleet and adjusting their strategy with EDI's input. She couldn't look away from them.

'Do not fear,' he whispered, gentle and amused. 'You will outlast everyone on this ship.'

He released her, and all the red dots on the display blinked out.

* * *

She lead the way across the surface of a dying world. Her breath hissed inside her helmet.

Javik walked next to her, tense and silent ever since they had stepped off the shuttle. Dust swirled in their wake and dull rock crumbled under their boots.

Overhead Sephiroth floated some hundred meters in the air, unshielded in the low atmosphere world, studying the barren wasteland. His hair and coat whipped about in the wind, making him a black and silver smear in the skies. She didn't often seem him against the backdrop of a world. In her mind he was a creature purely of the emptiness of space, not the quiet mundanity of earth and sky. Today he carried a sword.

"This was a metropolis in the last cycle. Heavily fortified against the Reapers," Javik said quietly. "We held it for… years."

Strange, scraggly plants peeked out between the stone here and there, but nothing crawled and nothing flew save for dust catching on the seams of their armour.

She kicked at the dirt. "There aren't even any ruins." Some of the Prothean cities had survived as skeletons of themselves, crumbling testament to those who had come before. Not even the foundations had survived here.

They found the emergency beacon that drew them, a crashed old Turian vessel perched on the edge of a cliff. The crew had run out of food and then oxygen shortly after. Shepard turned off the broadcast.

"He would have made a good Prothean," Javik said while they walked through the dark corridors, torches on their armour lighting the way. He didn't have to specify who he was talking about.

"I think he would say that the Protheans would have made good spirit energy," she replied darkly.

Would that have been kinder than what the Reapers did to them?

Javik didn't reply.

He was the only member of the crew who had looked her in the eye when she welcomed Sephiroth aboard. When she cut a deal.

"He's getting more powerful," she whispered. He could hear them, of course. He could always hear them now.

"How many has he taken?"

"Twelve thousand now."

"I would have given my homeworld for such a number," Javik replied plainly.

"What about the Prothean homeworld?" she asked the defeated general of the last war against the Reapers.

"Will you give the human homeworld?" he asked back.

She didn't look at him, and he didn't ask again. He knew the answer anyway.

Sephiroth had landed when they came back out into the dusty rays of the red sun.

"This planet is old and weak," he said, looking out over the plains below. "It lacks even the strength to flee."

The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She stepped forward, a hand lifted and an objection in her throat.

He crouched down and placed a gentle hand to the soil, in the most human gesture she had ever seen from him.

His brow lowered over his eyes, heavy with anger. "They have stolen too much."

The words died in her throat.

He lifted his hand, drawing something back up with it, something her eyes couldn't make sense of or focus on. It was vaguely green, though she felt instinctively that the colour was simply something her mind had conjured for her to latch onto.

He drew the ethereal glowing presence up from the ground, cradling it in his hands. Streams of it rushed across the plains below in willing surrender, rising up to him. With near tenderness he let the battered life sink into himself, where there was no weakness or defeat.

"Enemies incoming, Shepard," EDI warned through the radios.

The shadows of Reaper ships entering the atmosphere drifted overhead.

At her feet, the scraggly plants wilted and collapsed into brittle dust. The texture of the planet itself changed, losing what little vibrancy it had.

Her Omni-tool blared alarms. Earthquakes were deep within the crust and would soon tear through the crumbling surface before collapsing into the magma of the core.

Had civilisation moved in different directions in this cycle, things been ever so slightly different, it could have been terraformed. It could have been colonised. It could have been saved, life slowly nursed back to health. Life could have returned.

Now it never would.

She wasn't a spiritual person. Never had been.

The ships were descending swiftly. She sent a hand signal to Javik and sent him running back to the shuttle.

"Sephiroth," she yelled. "Incoming!"

She reached for her rifle and backed away, but couldn't stop starring at Sephiroth's back. He was a dark silhouette shrouded in the surging, roaring light. It swept passed her boots, rushing around her and tugging against her skin.

He closed his outstretched hand in a blinding fist.

She turned and ran. The rivers of life slowed and then died away entirely. A silent shadow crept over her, covering the ground for miles.

A flash of light, and the shadow split in two. She didn't look back, didn't need to need to see Sephiroth rising up between the sliced open Reaper, like a burning meteor in reverse.

She couldn't watch, or she'd never stop.

A bullet tore through her torso.

She stumbled, and threw herself against a rocky outcrop. Husks screamed in the distance. Where was the marauder? She pressed a hand against her ribs and stifled a cough. Bullets buried itself in the rock face next to her. She threw up a biotic shield and lifted her rifle.

Her chest ached. Blood trickled into her lungs. She bared her teeth and fired. Her breathing hitched and she coughed and coughed. The husks ran at her. She threw a blast, tearing them open.

Her Omni-tool bleeped out a desperate warning, signalling her allies. Javik called over the radio, too far away to help.

The husks screamed. The ground shook and the red light dimmed.

She fired and fired and fired. Her shield wavered. She staggered, collapsing to her knees. She hacked up blood. The marauder's bullets threw up red mud and dirt

She couldn't breathe.

Light surged to life before her, liquid silver tinged green.

Sephiroth hauled her up and slammed her against the wall. Bullets warped away from him, leaving them in a quiet bubble where she was gasping under burning eyes.

The hole in her chest healed up, torn, burnt, and cauterised flesh reknitting together. She hissed and ground her teeth against the pain.

"You will have death when I grant it to you," Sephiroth said, his arm pressed against her throat. "Not before."

He dropped her and evaporated again.

On her knees again she heaved and hacked up the blood still sealed inside her lungs. She vomited it up, her hands fisting in the dirt. The husks charged her. She lifted her gun with bloodied hands and took aim.

He could have made it painless. He just didn't deign to extend her that mercy. She snarled, throwing a biotic warp, red dripping from her lips. Good. She didn't want his mercy.

She held her ground.

Reaper ships exploded silently in the stratosphere. The shredded debris reigned down around her. She made it to the shuttle and they fled up into space before the tectonic plate cracked in two.

The dying planet crumbled far below. Its murderer fought in a brilliant display that outshone its death rattle.


	2. Chapter 2

The Reapers fought Sephiroth with everything they had, until they suddenly didn't.

He hung on the edge of a star system, surrounded by a ring of Reapers that kept position, stubbornly out of range. They dodged and retreated and dodged and retreated until he stopped chasing them, and simply waited. More reapers joined the ring as the hours stretched by, entering through the distant relay.

The Normandy floated next to him.

Shepard's fingers hovered over the keys of her Omni-tool, her request only half typed. She sat in her quarters in her fatigues, one leg pulled up under her on her bed.

There was nothing else to be done until the stalemate broke. Whatever the Reapers were playing at she wasn't sure and she didn't like it, but they hadn't landed a single hit on Sephiroth yet. Sheers numbers alone were not going to make the difference.

The dappled blue light from the fish tank lit the room, filling it with dim shadows. She let her head fall back to gaze up at the swirl of stars through the window overhead.

The numbers from the last month of battles had been very good. Maybe she had grown too used to crushing defeat and constant, catastrophic loses as the war dragged on, but even counting the allied ship Sephiroth destroyed to test her, the recent casualties were… acceptable.

She snapped her head back down and kept typing.

No loses were acceptable. Inescapable, perhaps, in a war of this scale, but not acceptable.

She finished her message and sent it before she could think better of it.

What was left of High Command were trying to invent something to fight Sephiroth with, if he should actually succeed and defeat the Reapers. She wished them luck, but she couldn't know any part of it.

Garrus had looked at her knowingly when she brought it up with him. The years since he'd left the Normandy and taken up a Primarch's role had left them with too much in common and too little left to say. Long silences ruled their conversations now.

"You know if you're compromised or not," was all he said.

She sighed and stood, peering into the tank. It housed only fake coral and the rusty feeding apparatus now.

The light in the room took on a green tinge.

Her guest sat on the couch, watching her. She watched his reflection in the glass, hair pooling around him like liquid mercury floating in a vacuum. He looked comfortable and entirely incongruous with his legs crossed on her old leather couch.

He didn't come inside the ship often unless they were jumping through a relay. He tended just to float out in the vast emptiness, alone with the cosmos.

"They haven't broken formation?" she asked. He wouldn't be here if he didn't have something to say.

"A star is missing," he said, conversationally.

"What?"

He studied her in the glass.

He always looked slightly off but his reflection was… worse, somehow. As if he wore only the memory of a human body, partially forgotten over time and reliant on the viewer to fill in the gaps. Flipped, the unnatural angles and details suddenly stood out.

"Your crew think on it sometimes, but they will not name it, not even in their own minds." He turned his head away from the light, casting himself in harsh shadows with the glow of his own eyes. "They cannot face themselves."

She looked down at her hands. She knew what he was talking about.

"We have more pressing priorities," she said.

He rose.

"There is an emptiness in the cosmos where I did not create one… and a missing relay in your system." He loomed behind her, looking down at her through the reflection. "Why?"

Her gaze wandered into the empty water, filtered and oxygenated for nothing. "I pulled an alpha relay trick on it."

He put a hand over her shoulder and flat on the glass. The blue light died.

"What did you do?" Two green beacons peered down at her, refracting in the glass.

She couldn't meet his eyes. "Why ask? You're already in my mind. Look and see."

"I am asking," he said, a deep and rumbling threat.

She whirled on him, suddenly furious. At him, at the Reapers, at the damned Asari who didn't defend their own borders and thought everyone else would bleed to save them.

"I threw a meteor at the relay. I destroyed it. The explosion took the sun, the planets, the moons, the asteroids. Everything in the star system."

The carefully calculated disdain of his expression faded away. She thought she might have actually shocked him.

"There was life circling that star," he said with more voices than one, looming over her. "It was not yours to take."

She refused to lean back. "Fifty-seven Reapers too."

"You scattered their energy to the void. Reduced to dust."

"The planet had already fallen. They made two new Reaper capital ships from the population and had enough prisoners to make even more. It was a chokepoint. I closed it."

He cocked his head, regarding her with a curious, malignant gaze.

"Your crew call me an abomination. Do you know what they call you?"

"I don't care," she whispered. "We are not losing this war."

He smiled. "You are a wretched thing." He ran his fingers through her hair until he was cradling her scalp.

Her skin crawled. She tried to pull back, but he gave her no slack.

"If I break your legs, will you crawl?" he mused. "If I refuse to slay your enemies, will you beg?"

She stopped struggling. Dread sat like a brick in her stomach.

He turned her head and brought his face up to hers, his lips brushing her temple, ever so gentle. "If I take you, will you fight me, even after you have forgotten your own name?"

Silver hair caressed her. It stung and pulled at her skin.

She swallowed and looked the world killer in the eye. Her skull felt like it was going to crack under his grip.

"You're just pissed I destroyed them before you could," she ground out.

He frowned at her. "I destroy nothing. I cherish the energy, pure and radiant in its raw form."

She sneered "Go cherish Illium's ashes then."

He lifted her by the neck until she was eye level.

She bared her teeth. "Go on. Kill me."

The emergency lighting clicked on.

"Commander, the Reapers are moving again," EDI called.

He disappeared. She landed on her feet and ran to the command floor.

"Where are they running to, EDI?"

"To the relay."

"Track where they're going, but keep our distance," she called. She reached the cockpit.

"They're not fleeing," Joker said from the pilot's chair. His hands froze for a moment over his display. "They're firing on the relay."

She swore. "Get us out of here!"

Sephiroth was hedged in by thousands of them. He tore through them easily enough but for each one that fell another hurled itself at him, slowing him down with numbers alone and the debris of their sparking carcases.

"The enemy ships are too close to the relay," EDI said. "They'll detonate in the explosion."

Shepard stiffened. There were thousands in the star system. The amount of energy caught in the chain reaction-

"Sephiroth, get back on the ship," she said, quiet and calm.

The Normandy sped towards the relay. Sephiroth fought through the throng of enemies, falling behind.

"Commander?" Joker called.

She looked at the display. The readout of the relay's falling defences, and the sheer number of enemy vessels between them and it.

They weren't going to make it.

Anger burned, cold and futile inside of her. She fell still.

"Take us to light speed, Joker," she said. "Get us out of range of the explosion."

"Yes, Commander."

The relay was turning, igniting. The same process as flinging ships thousands of light-years across the galaxy just a million times more powerful and without connecting to any other relay in the system.

The drive core hummed to life and the mass effect fields enveloped the ship.

Light exploded. Tinged with green.

She tasted copper in the back of her mouth and her blood stilling in her veins with the vertigo of movement too quick, unsupported by the mass effect fields.

The ship rocketed forward. The relay, still in the infancy of its explosion, caught them and sent them onwards.

The feeling of being stretched subsided. The emergency lights blinked orange for a relay jump, some two seconds too late.

"What." Joker's hands were still held up over his display, unmoving over controls that had moved without him.

"We are in the relay system, Shepard," EDI filled the silence.

Joker clenched his hands. "That motherf-"

Shepard put a heavy hand on his shoulder.

Behind her, the airlock opened and Sephiroth walked in. She glanced at him over her shoulder.

He had controlled the relay. He had warped- what, time? Space itself? The element zero and energy stores of the relay to delay just long enough to force one last jump out of it?

"Shepard," he drawled, not one hair out of place or a scratch on his coat. He wasn't floating on invisible currents for once, but uncomfortably present. Her crew couldn't take their eyes off him.

She turned back to Joker and the glowing displays. "I'll see you in the war room in a moment, Sephiroth."

His boots thudded against the floor as he walked away. How kind of him to play along, like she had any authority or leverage over him at all.

"What the shit?" Joker hissed after the elevator doors on him.

She'd never seen him actually use a door before, let alone an elevator. He didn't move about the ship much mid-jump either, he set up camp in one area of the ship and made everyone work around him. She had assumed he couldn't access some of his stranger powers when being flung about at those speeds. She had assumed much.

"Where are we?" she asked.

He pulled his cap off and gripped his head.

"On the way to Turian space," he mumbled.

"It's the course I plotted before you ordered us to jump," EDI said. "I didn't activate the relay."

She sighed. "Run diagnostics."

* * *

She stood outside the war room, bracing herself.

She was so tired. They hadn't even resolved their previous… discussion. Where did they stand? What games was he playing with them now?

There had been some seven thousand Reapers in that system. Not anymore. The relay was gone, the passageway collapsing behind them, in what she could have sworn was an utterly impossible manoeuvre.

A more effective version of the Alpha relay trick than she'd ever managed. A seething vindication bubbled up inside her.

The Reapers had wasted so many of their forces in the attempt. Forces they must have deemed expendable, but the numbers they had willing sacrificed to get him out of the picture were telling on their own.

They were getting desperate.

She glowered at the door. See how they liked it.

She pulled herself up and walked in.

Sephiroth was sitting at the table's side, still playing at obeying the laws of physics.

She sat opposite him, leaning forward on her elbows and clasping her hands.

He leaned back, his arms loosely crossed.

"So, what happens now?" she asked.

"Nothing has changed," he said. "You will continue to bring me Reapers."

"You don't need us."

He looked down at her, amused. "I have never needed you. I will accept you, nonetheless."

She sucked her teeth. "Why humour us?"

"You have utility."

She shook her head and looked away.

"You wish to withdraw from our agreement?" he asked.

As though he would ever let that be an option. As though she had any alternatives. He had changed the game, but they still weren't winning. There were millions of Reapers.

She glanced up at him. His expression was idly curious, like she was an intriguing beetle he had spotted while waiting for the bus.

She needed him, but he didn't need her. He had his own reasons for wanting the Reapers dead, she could just give him a ship and go report to the teams trying to uncover a way to kill him. Leave him in the Reapers hands and check back when he ran out of enemies.

She laid her hands flat on the table. She couldn't do that.

"No," she said, leaden and dull.

He tilted his head.

"Have you made peace with it, Shepard?" he asked again.

"I don't trade in peace," she replied, easy habit now.

He put a hand on hers. "I will gift it to you."

She resisting the bone deep urge to pull her hand back. "You demand a lot for a man talking of gifts."

"No less than you demand. Only total victory."

"Why do you keep asking?" She scoffed. "Will you delay your plans if I'm not at peace with it?"

"There is no accomplishment to be found in ending your life." He withdrew his hand. "You are a single crack in the hull away from death at any moment. Your delicate frame begs to relinquish its spirit, whether it be to the Reapers or weaponry or simple misfortune."

She clenched her jaw. "I've lasted this long."

He smiled and saw right through her. "No, you haven't."

The artificial tendons in her heart missed a beat.

"And yet, for all your frailty, they have failed to break you. The enemy pushes against your being, searching for weakness in your resolve, to draw fruit from the seed planted within you." He tilted his head and she felt like the beetle was pinned to a card under a lamp. "Eight years and they have wrought nothing but failure."

She swallowed. Why was he bringing it up? "Did you stop their attempts at indoctrinating me?"

"No."

"Of course not."

"You resist on your own strength… and you will give up on your own strength."

"No, I won't."

"You will volunteer for my peace because it is not theirs." He leaned forward, his hair falling forward to shadow his face. "Your surrender will be their final failure."

She sneered. "You think defeat will look more palatable if you dress it up like a victory?"

His smiled, his eyes so cold. "If it were palatable then there would be no triumph in making you swallow it."

She refused to let her eyes drop, while her stomach plummeted. "And if I refuse?" she rasped.

"Can you afford to?" he asked, gentle and refusing to give her anywhere to hide. "None of your decisions were made in ignorance or by accident. You knew what you were doing, turning yourself into. Continue on the path you have set for yourself, Shepard, with your eyes wide open."

A muscle in her jaw ticked.

"Did you know?" she asked. "Did you know what you were turning yourself into?"

The intensity in his expression sharpened. "I am what I was always destined to be."

She found it in herself to smile. "So you didn't know. And someone chose for you."

"No." His hair floated around him, and the roiling void behind his eyes grinned back at her. "I knew."

She pulled back. There was nowhere left to go.

"You're no better than the Reapers," she said. It sounded hollow even to her.

He laughed, quiet and reprimanding.

"So tell me to leave."

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. She couldn't.

No.

She could. But she wouldn't.

He smiled. He knew.

* * *

_A/N: Thanks for reading guys, I know this one is a bit more angsty than my normal stuff. Some times I just gotta burn the world down. _

_Next Time: At Peace_


	3. Chapter 3

Shepard found him floating in silence, watching the bands of the milky way.

They were meant to leave the star system an hour ago but Sephiroth hadn't come inside, or even acknowledged their request, so in the orbit of the gas giant they remained.

She stood by the window of the observation deck, looking at his back.

The last battle had gone much the same as all the rest. He did the bloody work and she co-ordinated their allies to stay out of his way while they fled. Until near the very end, he'd slowed down. He still fought, she didn't think anything in the galaxy could stop him from fighting when he wanted to, but it was almost cursory. More Reapers got past him to shoot at allied vessels and for once she didn't think he was making a point or playing some kind of game with them.

Could a sentient ball of parasitic energy be wistful?

She turned away from the window, a thoughtful frown on her face, and sat down at the empty bar.

They still had alcohol, for all that they had lost most of the garden worlds and live ships. It kept well and was commonly used in bartering since citadel credit currency collapsed. The supply lines were a mess, and it had only gotten worse after the reapers stopped targeting population centres and moved onto agricultural areas.

The Normandy was high priority in the war, it always got food. Not everyone was so lucky.

She made herself a drink and pulled out something to read. The implants in her chest and oesophagus didn't like the burn of it. She smacked her lips. The dead didn't have the luxury of pain.

She kept Sephiroth in her periphery, as she swiped through pages. He was still floating out there in the darkness under a halo of hair. Either he would decide he was ready, or he wouldn't.

She was halfway through some old human poetry when he spoke.

"The last dreadnought came from the human homeworld," he said, his voice clear despite the vacuum and reinforced hull between them.

Her eyes paused on the lines. 'Between the woods and frozen lake…'

"Did it?" She'd always wondered how they organised themselves. Other than Harbinger, and Sovereign all those years ago, all the Reapers were identical.

"It feasted on the glut." He turned to her, half his form illuminated in the harsh white light of the nearby star, the other half lost in shadow. "The dead held onto your name with hope. They awaited salvation… until the end."

She starred at the holographic page. 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep.' She looked down to her drink. The bottom of the glass looked back up at her.

"Have you nothing to say?" he demanded.

"Do you care?" she slammed her hand onto the bar top. The light from her Omni-tool died. "They ended up in the same place." She let out an old and stale breath. Her throat ached, old implants doing their job but grudgingly. She was probably rusting. "I failed them. Years ago. I know that, and so did they."

"They did not know." He scowled down at her. "They didn't believe the fight to be over, not when their bodies were stripped of life or their spirits stripped of consciousness."

Her hands balled up into fists. "What is the stubbornness of dead humans to you?"

"Nothing." He turned away, facing the star again. "They are nothing at all."

She forced her shaking hand to unclenched. That he was bringing it up was.. odd. "You sound less pleased over that than normal."

Shadow lurking at his back, billowing in the folds of his coat. One of the gas giants would hide the star soon and drown them both in darkness.

"The capital ship," he said after a long silence. "It was made on my first planet. From the bones of the Cetra."

She straightened at that. He looked oddly lost. She turned on the barstool to watch him.

"I thought you hadn't dealt with the Reapers before."

"In the previous cycle. I am the last descendant of those few who survived."

She shook her head, confused. "How could you tell? There… there was still a trace of them in there? They held onto themselves for fifty thousand years?"

"My kind endure in mind and spirit beyond the end of our bodies." His gaze dropped from the star, but there was no looking down in space. Just as there was no looking up.

"They begged me to erase them," he said. It whispered through the room, barely even a voice, barely words.

"Did you?"

"They are pure energy now. Unburdened by their past selves." He gazed down at a black-clad hand, edged with light. His voice remained a whisper. "I will make them anew in the promised land."

"No, you won't." She slid off the barstool, her boots hitting the deck with a thud. How many billions? How many trillions? How many species? "They're gone. They will always be gone and nothing can change that."

Shadow swallowed him as the star disappeared behind the planet.

"You don't know what I am capable of." It lacked his usual conviction.

She threw back the last dregs of the clear alcohol.

"You too will beg for oblivion when the time comes," he said, and it sounded damn near resigned.

"Will you?" she asked. She couldn't see him, not even the green tendrils of energy she could feel wrapped tight around the ship, around each member of her crew, around the fragile folds of her mind. She didn't need to see him.

"Someone once told me submission is preferable to extinction." She stared into the dark. "They were wrong."

Silence was the reply.

She turned and walked to the door.

"We're jumping in twenty minutes," she said, glancing back. "Are you in or out?"

Silence.

He stepped through the window, no backlighting or brilliant glow. A prowling shadow that met her eye with dreadful promise.

"Bring me more Reapers."

* * *

The fight ended over planet Earth.

That didn't surprise Shepard, but it did irritate her. It felt cruelly poetic, her boots thudding across the Citadel Stations' bridge again, after all these years. Outside Sephiroth flew past the windows, formless and eldritch, tearing the life out of Reapers as they tried to flee.

The giant space station still orbited the human Homeworld, upsetting tides and casting shadows across the lands far below. It's five long wards reached out in firing position from the circular ring of the presidium in the middle, like a giant metal flower. A memorial to humanities failures.

They had taken and lost it three times since that day eight years ago. They retrieved a lot of the wasted resources from the Crucible, and from the look of the bulky protrusion mounted on the Alliance's only remaining dreadnought, they'd repurposed it into their anti-Sephiroth weapon.

It was more than she's expected. She was proud of them. It hadn't so much as grazed him yet, but he looked invested in not getting hit by its beams either.

She had no idea what it did, but that wasn't her problem. She had to disable the Citadel's relay to trap the Reapers in the star system. Their ground troops chased her, banshees throwing biotic waves and husks screaming.

She barricaded herself into the familiar control room. She didn't look at the spot where Anderson had died, or at the hologram of the Reaper's AI as it tried to dissuade her. Outside the Normandy shot past, pursued by dozens.

She tapped into the Relay's controls and turned it to only one way travel, they could enter, but nothing could escape the system until she changed it back.

Sephiroth took up his station in the centre of the stations' ring. She felt static run through the ground below her, and the reapers sparked in every direction. Lights died and the power of raw spirit energy dragged past her.

He took up physical form, a blinding show of power that she could barely make out. A golden and silver silhouette of halos and wings and clouds against the green rush of power. She snorted. He was the most overwhelming thing imaginable and that gave it away. It was entirely imaginable, the superlative of human religious imagery.

Here, in the skies over humanity's homeworld, where the species had tried, and failed, it felt right now.

He would hate it, and that made it right too.

She looked back to the shallow step behind her where nobody sat and blood had been cleaned away by the Keepers years ago.

"Best seats in the house," she murmured.

The controls in front of her glowed bright, and the murmuring rush of power rose in pitch. The force of the current pulled at her. The relay opened and spirit energy rushed in from every reach of the milky way, pouring into Sephiroth.

A Reaper capital ship drifted by the massive windows, lights dying and hull crumbling, and she knew…he wouldn't stop with the Reapers this time.

The Alliance weapon on the dreadnought powered up and didn't seem to do anything at all. The Reaper AI floated in silence at her side.

She couldn't see the Normandy anymore.

Husks scrabbled at the door to the control room. She swung her rifle from her back and fired through the rush of spirit energy. The husks collapsed, their life added to the current. A banshee ran in after them, its shield flickering out under her bullets.

The Alliance's weapon fired, and the current of green light trembled.

It felt like time as she saw, in the epicentre of it all, Sephiroth stagger. The surging tendrils of life lurched, uncertain suddenly in the vacuum around him. Knocked ever so slightly from his position of power.

The banshee reached for her.

Lights flickered back to life along a Reaper hull.

Sephiroth's forehead creased, confused. For the first time, it looked like a genuine reaction, not just something projected. For a single perfect moment, he was actually inside that near-human body.

One shot. Her last breath either way.

He barred his teeth. Silver hair rippled out behind him, green eyes sparking with anger even at this distance.

Silver glinted in her sights. She pulled the trigger.

The banshee fell, a bullet in its head.

She let out a breath. Time resumed its mad dash to the end.

Sephiroth's lips curled into a smile. She was the only one watching. He lifted his hand and the weapon idled as spirit energy rushed out of its control room.

She looked at the Reaper AI at her side. It had lost cohesion in the current, only a shape now, staring her down. She held her empty rifle, a banshee corpse at her feet. Her lips stretched into a bloody smile. It gave in to the rush of the current and was gone.

She turned away from the controls, from Sephiroth, lurching against the force pulling at her. The Sol System stretched out before her. Against the black backdrop, metal hulls caught the light of her sun. Tears streamed down her face.

Earth lost some of its colour.

"Shall I give you peace, Sephiroth?" she asked, looking out over her galaxy. It had been long enough.

No reply came, and she glanced back over her shoulder. He was straining to bring a whole galaxy to heel. He looked like he was in pain. Good.

The rush of energy started to catch on her and she staggered back a step.

"You don't trade in peace," he replied

She spat blood and smiled. "Neither do you."

Earth cracked, volcanos exploding along the edge of the Pacific. The current threatened to pull her to her knees. She kept her feet. She would stand until the end. Nobody forced her hand.

The world turned white. And a little bit green.

* * *

A/N: Thanks for reading this terrible little story, I just needed to burn the world to the ground. Comments are always welcome :)


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